Moscow believes it can outsmart US in Ukraine peace talks: Estonia

Estonia’s intelligence chief says Russia has no intention of ending the Ukraine war and is stalling talks with the US. While Washington claims progress, experts question whether President Putin genuinely wants peace or believes he can still win.

London: Russian officials have no desire to halt Russia’s almost 4-year-old invasion of neighbouring Ukraine and think they can “outsmart” the United States during talks with Washington about how to end the war, a senior European intelligence official told The Associated Press.

Kaupo Rosin, the head of Estonia’s foreign intelligence service, said Moscow is playing for time in the talks with Washington and “there is absolutely no discussion about how to really cooperate with the US in a meaningful way.”

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Rosin, who spoke at an online briefing with reporters ahead of the publication of Estonia’s annual security report on Tuesday, said the findings were based on intelligence his country gathered from “Russian internal discussions.” He did not elaborate on how the information was obtained.

Russian officials have publicly insisted they want a negotiated deal, but they show little willingness to compromise and remain adamant that their demands must be met.

US-brokered talks between envoys from Russia and Ukraine in recent weeks have been described by officials from both sides as constructive and positive, but there has been no sign of any progress on key issues in the discussions.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, “in his head, still thinks that he can actually militarily win (in Ukraine) at some point,” Rosin said.

A White House official responded to the Estonian intelligence chief’s comments and said the president’s negotiators had made “tremendous progress” on the talks to end the war in Ukraine. Although prisoner exchanges have happened sporadically since May, they pointed in particular to a recent agreement in Abu Dhabi among the US, Ukraine and Russia to release more than 300 prisoners.

That agreement was evidence that efforts to end the war are advancing, said the official, who was granted anonymity because they did not have permission to speak publicly.

In an indication that US President Donald Trump wants to accelerate the momentum of peace efforts, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week that Washington has given Ukraine and Russia a June deadline to reach a settlement. Trump, over the past year, has set several deadlines that have come and gone without apparent consequences.

Fiona Hill, a Russia expert and adviser to Trump in his first term, said Trump and his officials are spinning a story that depicts the US president as a peacemaker and, for that reason, they are not interested in changing their assessment that Putin wants to end the war.

Both leaders, she told the AP, “need their version of events to play out” and are hanging on to their version of the truth — Putin as the victor in Ukraine and Trump as the dealmaker.

It’s unclear why US officials believe Putin wants peace

Although Trump has repeatedly suggested that Putin wants peace, he has sometimes appeared frustrated with the Russian leader’s lukewarm approach to talks.

From an intelligence perspective, Rosin said he doesn’t know why US officials believe the Russian leader wants to end the war.

Hill, who served as a national intelligence officer under previous US administrations, said it’s unclear what intelligence information Trump gets on Russia — or if he reads it.

He relies heavily on his lead negotiators, special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who Hill said may struggle to believe that the damage to the Russian economy caused by the war is a price Putin is willing to pay for Ukraine.

Referring to reports that Witkoff has attended meetings with Putin without a US State Department translator, she questioned if Trump’s envoys understood what was being said in meetings and suggested officials may be “selectively” looking for what they want to hear.